In this ‘ruminative’ and playful (p. 2) book M. attempts to free himself (and others) of the delusion that Plotinus was ‘a reluctant earth-dweller’ (p. 11) or ‘thoroughgoing transcendentalist who despised the flesh’ (p. 43; see also p. 62). By Plotinus' account we play many parts, and need to find some central core within our many roles. That core, something that is essentially ‘one's own’, is located through forgetting everything of less importance. By M.'s account, Plotinus is at odds with Plato: forgetting matters more than memory, and ‘the investigation of erotic passion, clearly a starting point for Plato, is completely absent’ (p. 7). The impulse to procreate, which was for Plato part of the urge for immortality, is a weakness (p. 65): the mere fact of present reality is enough, without any need to add to it. On the other hand, art has a higher status for Plotinus than for Plato: it mirrors the divine, not merely the superficial shapes and colours of the natural world. But a living face, even an ugly living face, is still more beautiful, by the grace of the One on it, than even the best crafted statue. ‘Let us not be over-influenced by the idea of his being ashamed to be in the body. His whole philosophy points in the direction of his being thoroughly at home in the All’ (p. 13) – while at the same time reckoning that this world is little more than a children's game or drama (p. 54, after Ennead 3.2 [47].15).

M.'s examination of particular themes and metaphors is valuable, especially when he considers why Plotinus did not – for example – write an autobiography, despite (perhaps) discovering himself ‘as something other than the physical or historical person’ (p. 18). Why was this left to Augustine? Following L. Gerson and P. Remes, M. accepts a distinction between the ‘endowed self’ (in effect, the Aristotelian embodied soul) and the ‘ideal’ (the original that is now the goal of our recovery, eternally unfallen in the divine intellect). Plotinus would have us forget the mundane details of our lives here now: a programme nearer Plato's own than M. suggests (pp. 23–5): what Plato would have us remember are eternal truths, even if we here-now are cued to remember them by mundane details, whether geometrical puzzles or an enchanting face (as Plotinus also agrees). It is here that Porphyry's suspect claim that Plotinus was ‘ashamed to be in a body’ can be understood: Plotinus did not think his childhood or his appearance mattered (though he seems to have let slip odd details of his past, for reasons that Porphyry did not pretend to understand). ‘Memory does not constitute the essence of the self’ (p. 28) – or at any rate, memory of our mundane lives does not. The star-gods, of course, do not need to remember either their passage through the heavens or any eternal realities, since these are simply present to them: memory, strictly so-called, is no more than representing what is absent – and no real entity is absent from the divine intellect or the enlightened soul (pp. 30, 37).

By M.'s account Plotinus is at odds with Plato's Timaeus, in that Plato's imagined demiurge delights in the physical world he has made, whereas Plotinus would have him principally delight in the eternal reality, the pattern he is copying. ‘Plotinus’ demiurge is not only more other-worldly: he is more knowing' (p. 41) – knowing in particular not to be seduced by physical beauties. M. insists that Plotinus did not despise the merely physical world: that, after all, was the occasion of his furious essay ‘against the Gnostics’ (Ennead 2.9 [33]; see pp. 43, 130–2). But he still suggests that Plotinus was not at ease with physicality and the senses – chiefly it seems because he thought that lovers would be better advised not to have sex (p. 63), and ‘prudishly’ (p. 126) abominated the suggestion – culled from Plato's Alcibiades – that pupils should grant their teachers sexual favours. On neither point – pace M. – was Plotinus disagreeing with Plato. That there was a disagreement about procreation may be correct: ‘he who loves a beautiful woman merely because she is beautiful is superior to the man who loves her out of a desire to perpetuate himself’ (p. 65). M. professes to find this ‘remarkable’, as a ‘complete overturning of … Plato's anagogy’ (p. 66; see also p. 10). Others may find Plotinus' notion more agreeable!

M.'s recurring theme that Plotinus would have us dispense with all ‘emotion’ (p. 24) in favour of a ‘clinical, neutral’ understanding (p. 26) is misleading. His passion was for reality, and it seems wrong to discount that passion: no one, Plotinus supposed, could prefer merely to think he was with his beloved than actually to be together (Ennead 6.7 [38].26). Returning to the Father is a ‘passionate experience like that of a lover resting in the beloved’ (Ennead 6.9 [9].4). And intellect drunk with love, pace M. (p. 7), is better than any calm, analytic, calculating mind (Ennead 6.7 [38].35). Nor is this passion uncreative: on the contrary, every real thing copies or represents the One in engendering echoes and images of itself (see Ennead 3.8 [30].10) – but that is not its purpose. Nor is it as odd as M. finds it (p. 44) that the Platonic demiurge wishes to improve the very world in which He delights, to make it more like its paradigm. ‘Decoration is not given to hide horrible things, but to decorate things already adorable’, as G.K. Chesterton remarked in his Orthodoxy: ‘a mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it’.

Turning from memory, forgetfulness, subconscious awareness and love, M. examines Plotinus' insistence that Nous is King – and we too are kings when in accord with it (Ennead 5.3 [49].4). He associates this briefly with a notion – he suggests – derived from Arius, that we might all be raised to the status of a Christ (p. 73): but it was Athanasius (Arius' opponent) who suggested that God had become Man so that men might become gods, adopted into divinity by being made blood-brothers of the Incarnate Word. M. helpfully identifies the sense in which we are double, divided souls – as Heracles turns out to be divided between the heavenly Heracles and the lesser (Ennead 4.3 [27].27). ‘Royalty awaits us, as every human being holds within himself the possibility of advancing towards a more complete state, because he possesses in himself the consciousness of what pure intelligence is’ (p. 78).

M. also examines otherness, mirrors, artistry and living human faces, with help from Heidegger and Gabriel Marcel – all with a view to showing Plotinus' engagement with physical reality, even while he seeks to purge himself of distracting associations. There are oddities in this account – most notably his acceptance of Grabar's misleading description of Hellenistic art (and the art of Egyptian sarcophagi) as ‘photograph-like’ (p. 113) or ‘realistic’ (p. 114). These portraits were, on the contrary, as ‘air-brushed’ or ‘idealized’ as any modern model (and perhaps that does reveal what Plotinus hoped for in his advice to ‘polish’ our internal statues). It is – perhaps – one tension in his thought that he also recognised (as above) that even an ugly living face is more beautiful than a statue: why then prefer the idealised over the empirical? The best statues are the ones that ‘come alive’ (Ennead 4.3 [27].11)! That Plotinian thought and practice has some historical connection with Orthodox icon-painting seems less implausible to me than to M. (p. 117): all images must in the end be abandoned – but that is itself a part of Orthodox doctrine, even for iconodules. The One is beyond all words, and Knowledge is not of propositions.

M.'s book is replete with insights and useful references: we can hope that his readers are also cured of the delusions that he identifies, and encouraged to read the Enneads for themselves.